The relaunched Hollywood Film Festival has announced its first round of socially conscious programming

The rebooted Hollywood Film Festival, which gained a new owner and a socially conscious viewpoint earlier this year, has announced the selections for its first round of programming, the CineCause Spotlight.

The lineup includes Justin Arana's documentary "My Name Is Water," about a disillusioned college student confronting the global issue of a lack of access to fresh water; "Boy Meets Girl," Eric Schaeffer's romantic comedy exploring sexual orientation and gender identity; and "A World Not Ours," Mahdi Fleifel's portrait of three generations of exiles in a Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon.

The CineCause Spotlight serves as an extension of Jon Fitzgerald's philanthropic platform CineCause, which connects audiences with the causes behind social-issue films. Fitzgerald, 47, is a festival veteran who came aboard the HFF as executive director in 2013 and acquired the festival outright in March.

"The word 'Hollywood' is synonymous with celebrity and glamour," Fitzgerald said in a statement Wednesday. "But Hollywood is filled with people who care about global problems and who recognize the power of celebrity, cinema and storytelling and how this power can help create change."

The Hollywood Film Festival boasts an enviable name, one that directly invokes the entertainment capital of the world, but since its founding in 1997, it has struggled to carve out a niche for itself among the thousands of film fests worldwide and the dozens in the Southland alone.

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